The Crist looking guy on the end. He's the only choice amongst a wall of derp if you are sane and insist on voting Republican. Too bad Huntsman's never, ever going to get the support he deserves.

Can we please drop the "Huntsman is a reasonable candidate" bullshiat? He isn't. He's an anti abortion, gold standard isolation religious fundamentalist nutjob. He's just better at hiding it than the other republicans.

He isn't reasonable, he isn't moderate, and he isn't sane. He is essentially Ron Paul with an authoritarian streak.

Fuggin Bizzy:fark you, Charlie Crist you side-switching opportunist. You're now officially the Mitt Romney of the Democratic party. WTF do you actually believe? Do you even know?

/Likes Democrats. Dislikes party-changers.

You should consider his stances before you label him thusly.

He established a reputation as a law-and-order senator, sponsoring legislation requiring inmates to serve at least 85% of their sentences before becoming eligible for parole.[3] He supported teacher salary increases, co-sponsored laws that created charter schools, and created a vanity license plate sold to raise funds for Everglades conservation.[12] As chairman of the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, Crist pursued an investigation into actions of then-governor Lawton Chiles amid allegations that Chiles' campaign had made "scare calls" to senior citizens days before the 1994 gubernatorial election. Chiles eventually testified before Crist and the committee and admitted that his campaign had made the calls.[3][11]

During his term as Attorney General, Crist was praised by civil rights and consumer groups for expanding the powers of his office to prosecute civil rights and fraud cases; for combating spam e-mail; freezing utility rates; adding restrictions to telecom companies, and protecting the environment.[3][15] He was criticized by pro-life advocates during the Terri Schiavo case when he ended official attempts to keep Schiavo on life support.[3][16]

There are other pieces in there, but to sum it up for you, he's big on conservation, civil rights efforts, anti-consumer fraud, has changed his mind several times about abortion(currently pro-choice), and has softened his views on gay marriage. He's big on healthcare reform and supported President Obama on a number of issues.

And this was all before he shifted to Independent, much less Democrat.

Perhaps it's safer to say that he finally realized that he was closer to Democrat than Republican, abortion views notwithstanding. Because, unlike the GOP, there are no single issue disqualifying views in the Democrat tent.

This About That:Peki: It will be weird if in 40 years I end up switching my vote because the Dems aren't liberal enough.

It might be interesting to read about the origins of the Democratic and Republican parties, particularly with regard to the issue of slavery. The Wikipedia articles will do.

Quite. The Republican party, the party of Lincoln, was the liberal party when it first started. The Democratic party was the party of the pro-slavery southerners. Things started to change in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and really changed during and after the war. And the change was made final with the "Southern Strategy" of Nixon, which converted a lot of the southern democrats into republicans. They were southern democrats because they were anti-republicans, those republicans who beat them in the civil war. But, because they were more anti-black than pro-slavery (at least, given the elapse of 100 years since the war between the states), they switched to the side that allowed them to manifest their bigotry.

winterbraid:"Charlie Crist's first official act as a Democrat was to tell a lie about why he is now pretending to be one," the Florida GOP said in a statement early Saturday. "The truth is that this self-professed, Ronald-Reagan Republican only abandoned his pro-life, pro-gun, conservative principles in 2010 after he realized that Republicans didn't want to send him to Washington D.C. as a senator, especially after he proved he couldn't do the job as governor."

Can I get somebody to sign for this?

[farm5.static.flickr.com image 287x287]

No kidding. The only reason the Florida GOP crucified him is because he didn't think Obama was evil and actually had the audacity to give the man a hug.

It's not that he abandoned his principles, it's just that the Florida GOP much like the National GOP has shifted so far to the right to pander to the delusional nutjob, that it left more reasonable conservatives like Crist behind.

I want to say this clearly. The fundamental differences in this country is the wage class and the investor class. Everything else is just a distraction.

The traditional business Republicans have been extraordinarily effective in getting large swaths of people to vote against their economic interests for two generations, and really got nothing in return but poverty.

IvanTheSilent:The Crist looking guy on the end. He's the only choice amongst a wall of derp if you are sane and insist on voting Republican. Too bad Huntsman's never, ever going to get the support he deserves.

Huntsman huffs from the same spray paint can of economic derp as the rest of the Republican party. He might be sane on a couple issues but he's fundamentally flawed as a candidate nonetheless.

I'm old enough to remember when so many conservative Democrats jumped ship and became official Republicans. I wonder if we're seeing the start of a movement by insufficiently-conservative Republicans giving up on the GOP and jumping the other way.

Whether this is a "good thing" depends on whether Crist, and others considering the same move, presumably, are merely out to change their label because they believe the Democratic Party is heading into a period of supremacy over the GOP, but haven't actually changed any of their beliefs and have no intention of changing their platform or the policies they support.

I don't really follow American politics as much as most people, aside from the number crunching and statistical modeling (which does interest me), so someone elaborate if this is incorrect.

Am I correct in assuming he is doing this partly because he sees the writing on the wall between the GOP becoming increasingly unpopular (despite massive gerrymandering) and Florida's 2012 presidential election results? Also because he has a better chance in defeating the incumbent (A Republican) while running for the opposing party as opposed to trying to primary him?

On a side note, I found this somewhat bizarre:

Steve Schale, a Democratic political consultant who worked on Obama's Florida campaign, called a Crist a "viable Democrat."

"He earned his stripes when he supported the president," Schale said.

Perhaps it's just me but that really seems to exemplify the "team sports" polarization of politics in America. Shouldn't he be viewed as a viable Democratic candidate based on his publicly professed political opinions and voting record, rather than whether or not he acted as an irrelevant cheerleader?

Or am I looking at that with too much cynicism?

/lots of question marks//yes, I'm aware both sides are guilty of gerrymandering

Yep, he is a perfect example, (as well as the policies of democrats these days.) that the democrats are a center right party and the republicans are a far right party. Christ has stayed the same while the parties have changed around him.

"Charlie Crist's first official act as a Democrat was to tell a lie about why he is now pretending to be one," the Florida GOP said in a statement early Saturday. "The truth is that this self-professed, Ronald-Reagan Republican only abandoned his pro-life, pro-gun, conservative principles in 2010 after he realized that Republicans didn't want to send him to Washington D.C. as a senator, especially after he proved he couldn't do the job as governor."

...the Florida GOP said in a statement early Saturday. "The truth is that this self-professed, Ronald-Reagan Republican only abandoned his pro-life, pro-gun, conservative principles in 2010..."

Exactly when did Crist espouse pro-choice or anti-gun principles? I think I must've missed that.

The anti-gun stuff is pure made outta whole cloth derp as far as I can tell but in 2010 Crist vetoed a GOP last minute anti-choice bill that contained a ban on coverage for abortion and the now infamous rape wand legislation, a move applauded by NARAL which played a large factor in why Crist was made eventually persona non grata within the particularly derpy world of the Floridian GOP.

I'm more amused by the Reagan reference as Crist's announcement replete with his citing "the Republican Party's shift to the right" as a reason for the change as it puts me in mind of Ronald's famous "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Party left me" announcement.

At the rate the GOP are currently expelling RINOs aka moderates it's looking like the next GOP convention will be able to fit nicely inside a medium sized Denny's without breaking fire code.

Newt Gingrich: "Hanging around with these farking losers. Can I get back to selling books to the dummies out here and stealing souls to stay young?"

Michelle Bachmann: "Is that man in the third row gay? Wish I could ask Marcus for his gaydar ... OMIGAWD MARCUS MARCUS YOU'RE NEXT TO HIM DON'T CATCH THE GAY!"

Mitt Romney: "Laugh it up farkfaces, I'm winning this dance as the White Horse prophecy predicted. Bet you $10,000 for it, peons."

Rick Perry: "HOLD THAT FART. Just a little longer. HOLD IT HOLD IT HOLD IT. Maybe if I suck some air in. Maybe I can just blame it on the old guy or one of these prissy pricks like Mitt or Santy. Gotta tell the aide no more burritos and Jack Daniels before these gigs."

Ron Paul: "They sure don't smell like maryjuana like that last crowd of college youngsters I was in front of. At least there's a feller there my age in the corner I can talk to. Maybe we can chat about when times weren't crazy like they are now. We'd talk about gold coin collecting or when service attendants at gas stations would fill the car up with petroleum distillate and re-vulcanize the tires, post-haste for a nickel. And it wasn't some Injun or Ornamental hiding behind bullet-proof glass demanding $20 first. Bullet-proof glass isn't in the Constitution."

Herman Cain: "Gotta love this scam. Sell a few books here and there, just say what these crazy crackers want to hear and get a missy here and there to go backstage for a 'deep discussion.' That one in row 4. Yeah, you. Tonight. This is the life!"

Devo:Doesnt mean he gets through the primary. Tampa mayor Pam ioRio is a good challenger. Anybody will beat Scott in the general

Iorio has done well for Tampa, sure. But Crist has widespread name recognition and appeal.

...also, I wouldn't go about saying that second bit too much. Everyone thought that about Scott the last time, too. He's got enough Tea Party support that it's better to run a moderate, well-known candidate against him come 2014.

When the Republicans are the party of wrong, there is no parity among the two parties. Republicans simply represent religiosity, big corporations, big oil, pollution, and don't give a rats ass about the little guy.

That's the party of wrong, so there's no DINO's or RINO's, or even left/right. The party of greed and pollution are doing everything opposite of moving society forward or saving the planet.

FTFA:But Schale predicted that if Crist runs for governor, he would likely get a challenge from Sink and other Democrats and would have to endure a hard-fought primary.

Yeah, that's a good move. The former, mostly popular Governor wants to run again on your ticket. But a better bet is to go with the woman that lost to a criminal/ idiot.

/ He ran the company that defrauded the federal govt out of billions of dollars// Either he was involved in and aware of the fraud, or he was so incompetent as to be truly unaware of it happening right under his nose./// Take your pick. Neither choice indicates a good CEO